An Eclectic Journal of Opinion, History, Poetry and General Bloviating

Friday, March 4, 2016

Beating Rodney King and the Dawn of a New Age

Rodney King after the beating and on the ground in a screen shot from the Holiday video tape.

Yesterday
was the 25th anniversary of Black motorist Rodney King getting his ass good and whipped by a swarm of Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD)
officers on March 3. 1991.The incident
was unremarkable and routine.It would have completely escaped notice except for one thing—a neighbor, George Holiday, shot the
attack on his home video camcorder and two days later gave the tape to television station KTLA.When they broadcast an edited
version of the tape all hell broke
loose.Outrage over the officers’ perceived brutality spread
rapidly as did a backlash in support of the police.Four of the officers involved were indicted and tried. When a California jury failed to convict any
of the men, the worst urban rioting in
twenty years broke out on April 29, 1992 resulting in 53 deaths and more than 2,000 injuries
lasting until May 4.Rioting spread to San Francisco, Las Vegas, and as far away as Atlanta.

That
video camera changed everything and
ushered in a new era in which police behavior was apt to be captured irrefutably by bystanders.That only intensified with rapidly
evolving technology which quickly made the bulky shoulder held camcorder used by Holiday obsolete replacing it with a rapid succession of ever-more compact, cheap, and widely available
technology including digital video which
made small, hand held cameras widely available and eventually ubiquitous cell phone camera capacity
that has made almosteveryone a potential citizen journalist.

A video camcorder like this captured the beating and ushered in a new era of citizen journalism and monitoring police behavior.

At
the center of this pivotal moment was
Rodney King, a 25 year old Black
man.He was not exactly a poster boy of innocent victimhood.He had
a checkered past, including run-ins with the law.His criminal record was relatively minor but at the time of the
incident he was on parole for robbery, which would be a factor in his disastrously muddled thinking that night.He was the father of three daughters—one
with his girlfriend as a teenager, and one with each of his two ex-wives.He was not an exemplary
family man.He had a taste for liquor and an occasional joint although he seemed to
have avoided more serious
narcotics.King worked off and on and was a cab
driver at the time.He liked hanging with his friends, which is what
he was doing that night.

When
most Los Angeles Whites looked at
King, they saw the quintessential Black
thug—a hulking criminal who defied police, continued to resist through escalating
attempts to subdue him, likely hyped up on drugs, and a real threat to the safety of officers who got
what he deserved.What Blacks saw
was hard knocks young man not much different than themselves or
those that they knew and loved who
was viciously attacked by members of
an occupying army in their
communities.

TV shows like Adam 12 helped give the LAPD a squeaky clean image.

Now
a quick look at the LAPD.It was then
widely considered an elite urban force known
for tight discipline and procedures and an aggressive patrol style.While cops in other big
cities like New York and Chicago were often slovenly and overweight LA
patrolmen were expected to be trim and in shape.In Chicago and NYC
cops still wore powder blue uniform
shirts that often seemed sloppy.In LA they were clad in tailored and menacing black.Eastern cops
still sported porn star mustaches.In the City of Angels they wore mirrored
aviator sunglasses.The public perception of the LAPD had been
shaped by decades of almost worshipful
portrayals on TV from Dragnet to Adam 12 to TJ
Hooker.On the big screen detectives played by the
likes of Clint Eastwood might go heroically rogue, but uniformed patrolmen were generally straight arrows.The Rodney King affair would be the
beginning of a long and continuing deterioration
of the Department’s reputation, especially in the Black and other minority communities.That deterioration would be fed in no small
measure by more citizen video exposés.

Before
a quick review of that fateful night,
a word on the nature of the violent
confrontation.Unlike many beating
captured on subsequent videos, this one was not simply a case of uncontrolled rage by the police, although the pumping adrenaline after a long high speed car chase undoubtedly was a factor.Nor was it a case of rogue
cops.On the whole, everything that
happened that night was approved LAPD
procedure.Not only that, but moments after the car
King was driving was finally stopped, a sergeant
was on the scene and took active command.Almost everything that happened
subsequently was in response to his direct
orders.That, combined with King’s continuing struggle to stand is in
large part why the mostly White jury either acquitted or failed to reach
a verdict.It raises the question of
whether the LAPD vaunted aggressive
patrol techniques and policies themselves were unnecessarily brutal and if they were applied with particular
harshness against Black and minorities.

That
night King and his buddies Bryant Allen
and Freddie Helms at another friend’s
LA house watching basketball and drinking.Around 12:30 am on the morning of March 3 two California Highway Patrol officers Tim and Melanie Singer,
a married couple, observed King’s 1987 Hyundai
Excel speeding and erratically changing
lanes on the Foothill Freeway (Interstate 210) in the San Fernando Valley.When they attempted to stop the car, king sped off starting on
of California’s notorious high speed
freeway chases.Soon dozens of LAPD
squads were involved and a helicopter flew
over to monitor the route.After exiting
the Freeway, the chase continued on residential surface streets.8 miles after it started LAPD squad cars
boxed in King’s car at the corner of Foothill
Boulevard and Osborne Street.

Five
LAPD officers were the first to join the Singers on the scene.Tim Singer approached the car and ordered the
occupants to come out and lay on the ground.Allen and Helms evidently complied,
although perhaps not fast enough.Both
were roughly handled.Allen was kicked, taunted, and threatened.Helms was kicked so hard in the head that the
baseball cap he was wearing was soaked in the blood of his scalp wound.King refused to come out from behind the
wheel at first.When he did come out he
reportedly acted bizarrelygiggling, waving and pointing at the police helicopter
overhead, and patting the ground.When he seemed to grab his buttocks Melanie Singer drew her side arm and started to approach him to make the arrest.

It
was then that LAPD Sergeant told Singer to holster her weapon and back
off.The police were taking jurisdiction and he was assuming
command.LAPD procedure was to approach apparently unarmed subjects in a swarm with weapons holstered to prevent the suspect
from seizing a weapon and turning it on officers.He ordered officers Laurence Powell, Timothy
Wind, Theodore Briseno, and Rolando Solano to close in on
King.

King
struggled to resist and threw two officer of his back.He repeatedly tried to stand.The officers later testified that they
thought he was unnaturally strong and
might be under the influence of Angel Dust—PCPs.He was not.The drug did not show up in his later blood
tests, although a breathalyzer test
administered in the hospital five
hours later indicated he was
probably nearly twice the legal level of
alcohol during the confrontation.Koon
deployed a relatively new tool—a Taserzapping King twice with little
effect.It was just after Koon’s second
Tase that Holiday began videotaping the incident from his apartment.

King
struggled once again to his feet and seemed to lunge at officer Powelwho
drew his baton and began beating
him.The few seconds of King’s alleged “attack”of Powel was edited out of the tape when it was first broadcast on
KTLA.Powel continued to beat King after
he collapsed on the ground striking him several times before Officer Brisnero
stepped in to stop him.Sgt. Koon
reinforced the order with a curt “That’s enough!”But King rose again to his knees.Now Koon ordered Powel and Officer Wind to resume the baton attack
with power strokes—the full weight
of the body behind blows designed to do as much crippling damage as possible.Koon ordered the men to go after his joints—knees, ankles, wrists—to
disable King.Brisnero also joined
in.A flurry of at least 33 blows and
six kicks connected, which became the heart of the Holiday video when it aired.When the beating stopped eight officers again
swarmed King finally getting him in handcuffs
restraining his arms and legs.He
was dragged on his stomach to the side of the road to await an ambulance to take him to the hospital.

At
Pacifica Hospital King was found to
have suffered 11 skull fractures
with possible permanent brain damage,a
facial fracture, broken teeth,
broken ankle, and internal injuries and bleeding.Hospital staff later testified hearing police officers brag about how many times that
had hit King and how hard.The severity
of the injuries required a long hospitalization
and recovery.King was never charged with any crimes in
connection with the incident—likely because of the press uproar after the video became publicand because testimony at a trial might affect the civil suit for damages that King’s lawyers soon filed or the eventual
criminal cases against the police.

King
eventually won a judgment of $3.8
million and $1.7 million in attorney’s fees from the City of Los Angeles.

Mug shots of the unhappy cops indicted by the District Attorney for beating Rodney King.

Meanwhile
on March 14, 1991 the District Attorney obtained
fast Grand Jury indictments against Koon,
Powell, Briseno, and Wind and against Koon for as supervisor for “willfully
permitting and failing to take action to stop the unlawful assault.”In August, before the case could come to
trial the California Court of Appeals removed
the original judge in the case after
he was overheard assuring the prosecutor
“you can trust me” and granted a defense
request for a change of venue to
nearly lily white Simi Valley in Ventura County.

The
jury there consisting of ten Whites, one Latino,
and one Asian acquitted three of the
officers, but could not agree on one
of the charges against Powell.Rioting broke out in Los Angeles soon
after the verdicts were announced.

Tom Bradley, LA’s Black Mayor
expressed outrage at the verdict—“The jury's verdict will not blind us to what
we saw on that videotape. The men who beat Rodney King do not deserve to wear
the uniform of the LAPD.”Even Republican President George H.W. Bush said,
“Viewed from outside the trial, it was hard to understand how the verdict could
possibly square with the video. Those civil rights leaders with whom I met were
stunned. And so was I and so was Barbara and so were my kids.”Such expressions of sympathy from the high and the mighty were not enough to quell
the rage in the streets.Neither was
the simple, plaintive appeal of Rodney King himself—“Can we all get along.”

Reginald Denny bleeding from a severe head wound after being dragged from his truck during the LA Riots.

The
events of the four day riot are too complex to go over here except to note that
another video tape of a beating became a symbol of the violence.A news helicopter caught white truck driver Reginald Denny at the
wrong place at the wrong time at the corner of Florence and Normandie Avenues.He was dragged from his truck and
beaten by a mob and suffered severe head injuries when his skull was
smashed with a concrete block.His life was saved when two near-by Black
residents, Curtis Yarbrough and Bobby Green Jr. who saw the attack
unfold live on TV rushed to the scene and drove Denny to a hospital.Another man took his truck back to his workplace.Denny’s injuries were serious and he spent
years in recovery.

It
took the combined force of the California National Guard, and Army and Marine Corps troops called up from nearby bases to finally bring the riots to an end on May 4 leaving broad
swaths of the city in smoldering ruins.

Federal
authorities
stepped in and indicted the same defendants on charges of depriving King of his civil
rights under color of law.In March
of 1993 Koon and Powell were convicted and sentenced to 32 month in prison.Ward and Brisnero were acquitted.Despite appeals, the two officers served
their sentences with time off for good
behavior.

As
for King, despite winning that big settlement, his bouts with substance abuse and run-ins with the
law were not over.He was arrested
several times for traffic offenses including DUI and was charged with trying to
rundown his then wife.He spent short
sentences in jail and several stints in rehab.His longest run at sobriety came after he joined
the cast of the cable reality TV
show Celebrity Rehab with Dr. Dru Pinsky in 2008 and the next
year appeared in a spin-off, Sober
House.He lost a good chunk of
his settlement money investing in a hip-hop
record label that failed.In 2010 he
became engaged to Cynthia Kelly, who
had served on the jury of his civil case.

On
June 12, 1992 Kelly found him unresponsive
at the bottom of his pool.He could not be revived.King died at the
age of only 47.An autopsy reported accidental drowning when the alcohol, marijuana, cocaine, and traces of PCP in his
system caused cardiac arrhythmia.

3 comments:

Shame on those who sympathize with this felon, who was drunk and speeding and weaving down the freeway, endangering life and limb of law-abiding citizens. If anything, this guy skated, because had he endangered my life or that of my loved ones, this guy would not have gone on to continue his life of crime. Those who don't understand what it means to stop and obey law enforcement invite and deserve whatever comes their way. It's time for the media to act responsibly and tell the whole story, not just sensationalize the event and making criminals and those of little brain victims and martyred saints. It's also time to take off the kid gloves in dealing with the "Black Lives Matter" and other lawless and terrorist groups, as they are a threat to life and limb of law-abiding citizens. Either the cops do it, or others will without apologies and any of the usual PC nonsense designed to put people in bondage and prevent them from exercising their natural right of self-defense and survival. Live and let live ------ Live and let die. And, the answer to Rodney King's infamous quote, "Can't we all just get along," is this: Sure, Rodney, just obey the law and don't violate the individual rights of others. In other words, Rodney, we can only get along when people act responsibly and within the law, not by mob rule, looting, rioting, and committing acts of violence and murder, which you and the media have encouraged by the sensationalizing and excusing of your criminal actions, which have all too often become a trend in following decades.

Are you fucking kidding me. That was not only racist but inhumane for this man (despite his record of mistakes) to be beaten the way he was. He didn't resist or fight back yet those racist cops outnumbered him and beat on him excessively. On top of that his civil rights were violated in the process. If that was your drunk uncle Bubba you would have been singing a different tune. Accepting responsibility would mean he needed to be arrested and tried and sentenced if found guilty. Those racists bastards almost killed him and he was unarmed and non threatening. I hope none of your family members or loved ones ever experiences anything even remotely close to this type of treatment. How easy it is to judge a book by it's black cover when you have never turned a page in it. Although I do not condone his reckless behavior and decision to get behind the wheel, the fact remains none of that warranted such a despicable act. And take the hoods off those KKK and white lives matter terrorists. Both are hate groups seeking supremacy. Instead of a support movement seeking equality and justice. Obviously the little brain is the one I am responding to.